The dress that divided a planet

In what seems to have been the greatest debate of all time , science is now telling is that the colour of the dress is, well, it depends…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have spent every waking moment of the last day debating the colour of THAT dress with your friends, family, barista, dentist, mechanic, teacher etc.

The picture of the dress was originally posted on Instagram by Scottish singer Caitlin McNeill, under the username ‘Swiked’, in which she asked her followers to settle a debate with her friends – was the dress white and gold or blue and black?

Scientists say that the colour of the dress all comes down to the way the eye has evolved to perceive colour in a world with varying levels of light. In this case, the lighting on the dress is so that it results in people filtering the light in different ways, correcting the colour to be white and gold or blue and black.

Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies colour and and vision at the Wellesley College, says that humans evolved to see things in the daylight and therefore the visual system is used to discounting the chromatic bias of the daylight axis (such as a blue-white at noontime). Here – our visual systems are either discounting the blue side (therefore seeing white and gold) or the gold side (therefore seeing blue and black). Bevil bets that night-owls are likely to see the dress as blue and black.

Kyle Wagner at Deadspin used Photoshop to prove that the dress is mid-range blue and brown, while photographer Hope Taylor used to Adobe to prove that the dress is NOT white and gold.